Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams Page B

titled
Edith
of
— oh, I forget of what— and the other was a screenplay which he had written when he was picked up by Hollywood as the result of the novella’s rather startling success.
    â€œLook here, boy, I understand that you fancy yourself as a prospective writer. Just open this book and read the first sentence of it.”
    And despite my failure to recall, at this moment, the title of the novella, that first sentence of it is clear in my recollection.
    â€œEdith was a sub-deb, meaning a debutante to be, and it was already apparent that she would be the glamour girl of next year.”
    â€œYes, lovely,” I remarked and handed it back to Grand, and then I picked up the screenplay that he had been hired to write on the strength of the book about Edith. The screenplay was of more interest to me then. I recall that I was mystified by the camera directions and the knowledgeability with which Grandmother Ursula interpreted them to me. Of course I can’t reproduce the dialogue nor Grandma’s technical interpretations at this distance in time, I can only improvise something of a likeness. The setting is/was an exotically furnished pied-à-terre on Sunset, and my grandfather, who describes himself with narcissan extravagance as silhouetted in a damply clinging silk robe against a picture window that seemed intended to present him to public view, much as a master portrait is framed and lighted in a way that is both delicate and dramatic, addresses his lady- companion— presumably my grandmother— without turning to face her. He says to her something like this:
    â€œYou know I had no intention of prostituting myself when I permitted my publishers to reproduce on the dust-jacket of my novella a photograph of myself in bathing trunks that were a bit too revealing.”
    â€œI don’t quite know what you mean,” says the lady-companion, obtusely. “I thought the photo was lovely.”
    â€œSo lovely that it inspired a pederastic producer to engage me to write a film play for a silent-screen star attempting to make a comeback in the talkies.”
    I kept running into a camera direction called POV, I remember, and Grandma explained to me that it meant the position of the camera, and it struck me, young as I was, that the POV seemed to be rather heavily in my grandfather’s favor. Even when the dialogue switched to the lady-companion, who kept expressing remarkable surprise and stupefaction over the fairly obvious revelations which Grandfather Krenning was delivering to her, the POV remained upon Krenning, and I remember that his eyes or his face or his whole being was repeatedly described as “ineluctably” something. Although I had an extensive vocabulary for an early adolescent in a small Alabama town, I did not understand the word “ineluctably.” I asked Grandma what it meant.
    She replied evasively. “Son, your grandfather was a literary giant.” Did she mean that Krenning was a literary giant each time he was “ineluctably” something? I am now aware that to be ineluctably something is to be inescapably something and so it appears to me, now, that Grandfather Krenning Phillips could not have been so inescapably or ineluctably a giant of literature, or prodigal of purity, yes, I believe it was pure that he “ineluctably” was in his own opinion, as the film script indicated.
    Well, he kept at it in this scene of the movie. In the idiom of today, he was laying a heavy number on his lady-companion’s head with these searing confessions and with his climactic outcry, “For God’s sake and mine, don’t let this monster corrupt me!”
    This cry of appeal left the lady-companion speechless, but the POV remained upon Krenning, in the silk robe that was transparently green as his eyes. Even then I knew there was something wrong there. If the clinging robe was both transparent and green, would it not imply that his